From Judy Molland at Care2.com
Last Wednesday the Kansas City Board of Education in Missouri voted to close 28 of the district’s 61 schools and lay off 700 of its 3000 employees. The district says the closings are expected to save $50 million, erasing the deficit from the $300 million budget. In a 5 – 4 vote, the board members endorsed the Right-Size plan, proposed by schools superintendent John Covington.
“We must make sacrifices,” said board member Joel Pelofsky, who voted for the plan. “Unite in favor of our children.”
What’s going on here? Is this yet another punishment meted out to schools that don’t match up to federal expectations? It turns out that this situation is a little unusual. Enrollment in the school district has declined by half in the last 10 years alone, and the schools are only 48 percent full. As Covington explained, “Keeping all of the schools open with too few children in them is draining the resources we need to improve the education of all students.”
This situation has evolved because children don’t live in the same numbers and the same places as they did when the schools were first built, decades ago. With “white flight,” families have moved to the suburbs and beyond, leading several superintendents to try, unsuccesfully, to pare back the number of schools, but until now the residents and the school board have been able to resist. John Covington arrived in July, saw immediately that the district was both underperforming and also going into debt and decided that things had to change.
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